It is well-known that many of the safety hazards of cellular telephone use could be alleviated by utilizing automatic speech recognition. While telephone-based speech recognition systems are known, cellular voice dialing over a mobile telephone exchange (“MTX”) presents significant challenges for two basic reasons. First, the recognition technology must accommodate a tremendous range of both remotely-mounted and hand-held microphone types. Second, the signal may be band-limited and degraded in transmission to the MTX where the recognition system will be located. Voice-controlled dialers of the prior art, such as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,853,953 to Fujisaki, have not been successfully implemented in the cellular environment.
There is therefore a need for voice recognition systems for use in the cellular, satellite and personal communications network environments that overcome these and other problems of the prior art and that facilitate the use of voice-dialing and other safety and convenience features.